The first-ever NBA In-Season Tournament semifinals begin on Thursday in Las Vegas when the Indiana Pacers, Milwaukee Bucks, New Orleans Pelicans, and Los Angeles Lakers battle for a spot in Saturday’s final and a $500,000-per-player prize for the winners.

By most accounts, the inaugural edition has been a success, though many players and fans initially questioned the event’s purpose. “I’m not even going to lie. I don’t even know what’s going on,” Los Angeles Clippers guard Bones Hyland said before the tournament began.

But as the group stage and quarterfinals played out, the NBA saw its best November attendance ever (averaging 18,208 fans per game), players increased their intensity, and viewership has been up from what the NBA normally sees during this point of the season. For example, group-play games on ESPN and TNT saw a 26% increase from last season’s comparable windows.

So, it’s safe to say that the first NBA Cup awarded on Saturday night won’t be the last.

However, the in-season tournament is young and may need to keep evolving to stay relevant long-term, which won’t be easy.

“It’s unlikely that we’re going to have a radical change to the format going into next year because it was so difficult to even align around this one,” NBA executive vice president of basketball strategy and analytics Evan Wasch told Front Office Sports.” But that doesn’t mean that tweaks aren’t warranted [or that] we wouldn’t consider bringing back some things that may have ended up on the cutting room floor.”

One of the early ideas that got scrapped: an eight-game group stage, which would have allowed for all five teams per group to play home-and-aways against each other. (Argument against: That could have diminished the importance of some matchups.) “I expect you would see even more urgency in some of those early games next year, which is a benefit of having only four,” Wasch said. 

Still, Wasch said the NBA is open to studying models that could increase the number of group-stage games and create a longer build-up to the knockout round.

For now, the NBA is getting ready to crown a new “champion” in December — and start what it hopes will be a new fall tradition.

The NBA’s current broadcast partners have to be happy with the inaugural edition of the in-season tournament.

Group-stage games on ESPN and TNT averaged 1.5 million viewers — a 26% increase from last season’s comparable windows — while local telecasts saw a similar 20% boost.

Next season, those media entities will hope for more of the same. But as the tournament grows, the viewership benefits might be seen elsewhere.

The NBA will explore selling in-season tournament games as their own broadcast package during the next set of media rights deals. The current ones will expire following the 2024-25 season. Potential bidders have been said to include Netflix, though with varying assessments of the streamer’s actual interest. Meanwhile, Amazon isn’t being shy about wanting to acquire at least some NBA rights.

Selling the in-season tournament to a single broadcaster would be an easy way for the NBA to bring on a new media partner and likely boost its overall rights fee intake, similar to NASCAR’s new deals, which include small midseason packages with Amazon and Warner Bros. Discovery.

But that scenario could prevent some novel broadcast mashups.

On Thursday, ESPN and TNT are each airing one of the two semifinal games, and the networks are collaborating on crossover coverage, implementing each other’s on-air personalities.

“This is the first step in something that potentially could create other opportunities [in] the future,” TNT Sports executive vice president and chief content officer Craig Barry said to Front Office Sports. David Roberts, ESPN’s head of event studio production, echoed that sentiment: “This is just a starting point.”.

Next April, after an exclusive negotiating period with Disney and WBD, the NBA’s full set of media rights will be open for bidding — the in-season tournament included.

Amid the success of the inaugural NBA In-Season Tournament, there has been a very notable and visually jarring exception: the court design.

The league introduced a set of 30 new designs aimed at creating separation between the tournament and regular-season games. For many teams, the feel is vastly different from their normal games. 

Those new looks, containing a unified design template for the first time in league history, are aimed in part to link to each team’s City Edition alternate uniform. Notably, the courts also are completely painted with no natural wood showing. 

The bolder designs, league officials said, were also boosted at the urging of commissioner Adam Silver, who pushed staffers to be “bigger and bolder” in their thinking.

There were two significant problems, however, with that approach: how fans felt about the floors, and how players felt. 

The floors quickly generated widespread rebuke among fans, particularly across social media, even as TV ratings for tournament games showed strength. Players primarily voiced a different and more pressing complaint, as the new courts were seen by many as slippery and an injury hazard. Celtics guard Jaylen Brown, whose $304 million contract is the richest in league history, hurt his groin in a game against Toronto and blamed the new courts.

“As players, we’re all here for the in-season tournament because it’s going to generate revenue, excitement, competition,” Brown said last month. “We’ve got to make sure the floor is safe to play on. We can’t put our players out there and risk their health.”

Costs for alternate courts such as these are estimated at $75,000 to $150,000 each, but some for the tourney are reported to be rented.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told the Dallas Morning News he’s “not a fan of the courts,” but that sentiment was quickly coupled with praise: “It was a brilliant marketing idea.”

The NBA’s relationship with Las Vegas was already growing quickly, but it’s about to take a giant step forward — with perhaps even bigger moves to follow.

The league will stage the semifinals and finals of the inaugural In-Season Tournament at Sin City’s T-Mobile Arena. The games mark an acceleration of the league’s presence in the sports boomtown following the existing NBA Summer League, the 2007 All-Star Game, and exhibition games played in recent years. 

Actively hyped since this past summer, even on the Sphere, the end of the NBA In-Season Tournament also marks the latest major sports event to hit Las Vegas.

“What Vegas brings to professional sports right now is pretty obvious to all these leagues, including the NBA,” said Steve Hill, CEO and chair of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. 

“There’s no place like Las Vegas now. What we’re trying to accomplish is to create further separation so they think about Las Vegas, and [then] everything else.”

Expansion Signs

The rising presence in Las Vegas, of course, begs the question of when the city will gain an expansion team, a subject that continues to dominate chatter around the league.  

Stars such as LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal have both publicly announced their intent to own a team there, while the Oak View Group hopes to lead a $10 billion development with an NBA arena as its centerpiece.

“The owners are all smart men and women,” Oscar Goodman, former Las Vegas mayor and husband of current mayor Carolyn Goodman, told NBA.com. “They know this is a very fertile area. Just a matter of time. It’s when, not if.”